Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

This is our neuropsychological home base: to be calm, contented, and caring.

The art is to find a balance in which you remain mindful, accepting, and curious regarding difficult experiences—while also taking in supportive feelings and thoughts. In sum, infuse positive material into negative material in these two ways: When you have a positive experience today, help it sink in to old pains. When negative material arises, bri

Neuroscientists have shown that meditators who’ve spent many hours observing their thoughts and focusing on compassion have less neural activity in parts of the brain associated with negative emotions, and unusually dense neural tissue in areas linked to empathy, love, and joy. The longer these people practice, the greater the change. They are lite

If you give your brain enough of a taste of mindfulness, it will eventually create a self-reinforcing spiral—a retreat from greed and hatred that could, Jud insisted, potentially lead all the way to the definitive uprooting of negative emotions (in other words, enlightenment). “Why would it stop?” he said. “Evolutionarily, it doesn’t make sense tha